The Melbourne Riots and How Harry Holdfast and His Friends Emancipated the Workers; A Realistic Novel - Softcover
Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1892. Excerpt: ... Hole of Calcutta would have given all their worldly possessions to have had good pure air to breathe there, so that their lives could have been spared; and it would be just so with us, were the air monopolized; we would willingly pay the monopolists' own price for the use of the air, just as we now pay his price for the use of the land.. But with our pioneers it is very different. The land with them is as free as the air with us. It costs nothing to use it, so no one has any incentive to monopolize it from another who also requires to use it, because he could get nothing from that other for the loan of it even if he wanted to. It is only because the land has become monopolized and transformed into a marketable commodity, that we try to secure more of it than we need. When it ceases to have that market value, and becomes valueless in a financial sense, we take good care not to have more than we can just use ourselves. The Bethel community, who owned their land in common, but used it individually, never had any dispute about the area each one should occupy. Each member, or his family, had their own little house, and there wasn't even a fence round it. You couldn't tell where one man's ground ended, and another man's commenced.,If you did see a little enclosure here and there, you found it was one to keep the fowls in so that they wouldn't destroy the crops; or it was one to protect certain vegetable growths from different animals who roamed about and might destroy them; or for some similar reason. But there wasn't any fence to say which was my land and which was your's. If ever we see a fence round some land, we know it is a sort of public notice to say ' This land's mine'; but you see the land of our pioneers, like the land of the Bethel people, is nobody'...
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